Kwiatkowski Advances to NCAA Singles Quarterfinals
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May 27, 2016
Championship Central | Singles Bracket | Live Scoring and Video
TULSA, Okla. – Virginia men’s tennis junior Thai-Son Kwiatkowski (Charlotte, N.C.) advanced to the quarterfinals of the NCAA Singles Championship with a 6-2, 6-1 victory over No. 3 seed Dominik Koepfer of Tulane on Friday (May 26) at the Michael D. Case Tennis Center in Tulsa, Okla.
Senior Ryan Shane (Falls Church, Va.) dropped his match against Virginia Tech’s Joao Monteiro, 1-6, 7-5, 6-2, and was eliminated from the tournament.
After logging a 6-2, 6-0 victory over Georgia’s Wayne Montgomery in the second round, Kwiatkowski had an equally dominant performance against Koepfer, who had been the top-ranked player in the country much of the season. Kwiatkowski, who won the ITA All-American singles championship in Tulsa in the fall, will face TCU’s Cameron Norrie, the No. 5 seed, in Saturday’s quarterfinals at 2:30 p.m. ET. Kwiatkowski advanced to the semifinals in last year’s NCAA Singles Championship before falling to Noah Rubin of Wake Forest.
“Dominik Koepfer is an unbelievable player, and between the fall season and regular season he had maybe lost three matches on the entire year,” Kwiatkowski said. “It’s pretty special to be No. 1 in a really good conference and a really good program. He’s an unbelievable player, and he won indoors this year so I just had to come out here and put as many balls on the court as I could. I really played with no pressure to be honest, because all the pressure was on him as he is the No. 3 seed and he is a senior. I am just happy to be here to be honest. We won the team championship earlier this week, and that was the big thing for me this season. Now, I am playing tennis just to have fun.”
Shane, the No. 8 seed in the tournament, won his first set 6-1 over 14th-ranked Monteiro, but Monteiro went up a break late in the second set to force the deciding third set. The two had faced one another earlier this season in Blacksburg with that match decided in a tiebreaker in the third set with Shane prevailing 6-3, 3-6, 7-6 (2).
With the loss, Shane’s season and Cavalier career comes to a close. In his four seasons at Virginia, he helped lead the team to three NCAA team championships, an ITA National Team Indoors title, four ACC regular-season titles and three ACC tournament championships. Individual honors for Shane included the 2015 NCAA Singles Championship, this year’s inaugural Oracle/ITA Masters Doubles championship as well as being named the ITA Atlantic Region Senior Player of the Year and the ITA Atlantic Region Arthur Ashe Sportsmanship & Leadership Award winner. The two-time singles All-American and two-time doubles All-American finished his career with a record of 103-35 in singles and 52-21 in doubles.
Live scoring and video streaming for all the matches of the tournament is available at http://streamingtennis.com/Tulsa/dual.html.